Communications of the ACM

I M A G E B Y A N D R E Y P O P O V

sible physically, and when asked to move to a different gate at the airport, taking a route that took twice as much time to complete as necessary.

The second approach, which An-
teby describes as “invisibility of
self,” involves employees making ef-
forts to “disappear in plain sight.”
He explains, “Even if management
could see the employees, they moved
about under the radar, showing no
emotion, nothing identifiable about
their clothes or demeanor, nothing
that marked them out as individuals.
There were about 1,000 employees,
and they were very good at this.”
Here the tale takes another ironic
twist, with TSA management saying
because it could not see enough of the

EMPLOYEE MONITORING IS an age-old practice in indus- trial society, harking back to manual timesheets. It has since developed in line with technology breakthroughs into a highly sophisticated process that is actively practiced by employers, and not always welcomed by employees.

Multinational professional services firm Deloitte notes the prevalence of employee monitoring in a 2018 Global Human Capital Trends article (“People data: How far is too far?”) authored by the consultancy’s human capital leaders. The article states, “Use of workforce data to analyze, predict, and help improve performance has exploded over the last few years. But as organizations start to use people data in earnest, new risks as well as opportunities are taking shape.” The opportunities include collecting employee data to address issues such as productivity and employee engagement to make better business decisions. The risks include breaching data privacy and alienating employees.

Michel Anteby, associate professor of organizational behavior and sociology at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, relates a rather chilling tale of employee monitoring.

In a study he started in 2011 and re-
ported in 2018, he tracked the expe-
riences and resistance strategies of
security screening personnel subject
to CCTV surveillance at a large urban
airport. Ironically, the U.S. Transpor-
tation Security Administration (TSA)
that employed the personnel and
set up the surveillance to strengthen
managerial control of employee theft
and reassure the vast majority of em-
ployees that they were not respon-
sible for theft, ended up with a disil-
lusioned workforce that felt a sense
of visibility of behavior, but a lack of
management notice as individuals.

This led the staff to engage in invisibility practices in an attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed.

Explains Anteby, “Increasing sur-
veillance made the employees feel
watched in a coercive way, caught out
if something went wrong, but not re-
warded when things went right. So
they adopted invisibility practices to
stay out of sight of managers watch-
ing them on CCTV.”
The employees took two approach-
es. First, they practiced invisibility of
behavior, which allowed them to tem-
porarily escape the scrutiny of man-
agement by taking extended breaks,
staying out of sight as much as pos-